news you won't find in the mainstream media

NATO says that with the Gaddafi regime ousted, it is close to success in Libya. Nevertheless, the alliance promised to remain in the region in order to secure its UN mandate.

During a briefing in Naples on Tuesday, NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu told the media:"The NATO mission is important, it's effective and it's still necessary in order to protect civilians. As long as threats remain, there's still a job to be done and we will get that job done.”

NATO is far from done with the operation in Libya despite the fall of Gaddafi's regime, said operation spokesman Col. Roland Lavoie. The alliance plans to continue supporting rebel forces as long as civilians in the country are under threat.

Lavoie said that rebels and Gaddafi loyalists are negotiating the fate of Sirte, a heavily-militarized city some 250 miles east of Tripoli and the home-town of the ousted Libyan leader. However, so far Sirte shows no signs of surrendering.

Negotiations with forces in Sirte are expected to end Saturday after the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, when the rebels would "act decisively and militarily," according to the head of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdel Jalil.

We now have incontrovertible proof that Israelis, working in Tripoli, actively managed Gaddafi’s intelligence services. When the inner sanctum was cranked open and BBC video teams entered, the documentation of this strange partnership was exposed for the world to see.

VT has uncovered that Israel has been working so closely with the Gaddafi regime that they were running his Homeland Security Headquarters…the countrywide communications intercepts and the torture chambers downstairs.

The companies identified, French and Israel partnerships which include EADS and IAI (Israeli Aircraft Industries,) manufacturer or the EAGLE systems, drones used for surveillance, signals intelligence gathering, target acquisition and attack, are identified as contractors.

What we have here is a foreign mercenary run security operation, partially due to Gaddafi’s need to keep an eye his defecting civilian and military people, and to keep his midnight raid people busy.

An Eagle Amus document popped into view…the French partners of the Israeli intercept equipment. With the office run in English, with Arabic translators of course, we really have a shot list of helper culprits…Canada, Britain, the American CIA, or the French…all NATO countries.

So there are really only two choices…one of the main NATO countries, or Israel. We have placed our bet. Welcome to the real world folks. It’s a nasty place.

More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, NATO is an obsolete and harmful anachronism. It has morphed into a vehicle for the attainment of misguided American strategic objectives on a global scale. Its mutation from a defensive alliance into a supranational force based on the nebulous doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” started with the air war against Serbia in 1999 and was completed with the Libyan intervention in the spring and summer of 2011. NATO in its mature form is beyond redemption or reform. It should be disbanded.

The Soviet Union came into being as a revolutionary state that challenged any given status quo in principle. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, Russia has been trying to articulate her goals and define her policies in terms of traditional national interests. By contrast, the early 1990’s witnessed the beginning of America’s attempt to assert her status as the only global hyperpower. Instead of declaring victory and disbanding NATO in the early 1990’s, the Clinton administration successfully redesigned it as a mechanism for open-ended out-of-area interventions at a time when every rationale for its existence had disappeared.

Following the air war against Serbia, NATO’s area of operations became unlimited and its “mandate” self-generated. Another round of NATO expansion came under George W. Bush. In April 2007, he signed the Orwellian-sounding NATO Freedom Consolidation Act, which extended U.S. military assistance to aspiring NATO members, specifically Georgia and Ukraine. Further expansion, according to former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, was “historically mandatory, geopolitically desirable.” A decade earlier, Brzezinski readily admitted that NATO’s enlargement was not about U.S. security in any conventional sense, but “about America’s role in Europe—whether America will remain a European power and whether a larger democratic Europe will remain organically linked to America.” Such attitude is the source of endless problems for America and Europe alike.

President Obama and his foreign policy team have failed to grasp that a problem exists, let alone to act to rectify it. There has been a change of officials, but the regime is still the same—and America is still in need of a new grand strategy. The threat to Europe’s security does not come from Russia or from a fresh bout of instability in the Balkans. The threat to Europe’s security and to her survival comes from the deluge of inassimilable aliens within the gates and from collapsing birthrates. These problems are due to the moral and cultural decay, not to any shortage of soldiers and weaponry.

What do a 1995 attack on a Japanese subway system, the crumbling security at Libyan military bases and al-Qaeda’s putative ambitions to create a “dirty bomb” have in common? They all sound scary, and therefore all fit (albeit with no small handwaving) into the latest narrative of the “threat” of Syria.

With the ink barely dried on the latest calls for NATO intervention in Syria, the Washington Post has emerged with an article brimming with unrelated factoids, most of which have not even a cursory relation to Syria, arguing that the nation’s WMD arsenal is something to be greatly feared.

The timing is brazen, being paired with another Washington Post article on rebel calls for NATO to attack the nation. It also comes just days after Dick Cheney, busily parlaying his book and the media’s notoriously short term memory into a restoration from hawkish caricature to “gravitas” wielding elder statesman, lamented his inability to start a war in Syria.

The fast and loose effort to cram anything and everything into the article is equally telling, as vague mentions of “dirty bombs” using fuel rods that Syria does not possess in particularly useful numbers combine with theories about nerve gas somehow polluting the world’s drinking water and food playing equal roles in a familiar game: frightening the public about an illusory enemy on the eve of dropping a bomb about the administration’s intentions to drop literal bombs on them.

That such a fanciful tale worked in the past was shameful enough. That it is being tried again while the occupation of the last “WMD threat” is still going on is nothing short of shocking.

Empire that we reside under is on the verge of collapse by institutional rot, fueled by avaricious greed. Removing ourselves from the diseased systems of the Robber Class is the only way we are going to survive the collapse.

Can it be any more obvious at this point that we cannot vote our way out of this mess? This system cannot be reformed to a place where it’s healthy, clean and safe for us.

Many people wrote to me in 2008 that “Barack Obama is our only hope.” Well, I don’t know how many more deaths and economic terrorism against our class it’s going to take before 100% of Obama supporters wake up to the fact that Obama was only “hope” for the Robber Class.

We have been finding that many people are on this parallel path of localization and we feel that it’s imperative to connect our communities in solidarity to build a new paradigm of people before profit and anti-consumerism that has infected us in the Robbed Class.

Alternative media activist David Icke, who has been warning about the false nature of the “Arab Spring” since it began over six months ago, has pointed out an astounding “flashback” regarding an August 3, 1981 Newsweek article titled, “A Plan to Overthrow Kaddafi.”

‘The details of the plan were sketchy, but it seemed to be a classic CIA destabilization campaign. One element was a “disinformation” program designed to embarrass Kaddafi and his government. Another was the creation of a “counter government” to challenge his claim to national leadership. A third — potentially the most risky — was an escalating paramilitary campaign, probably by disaffected Libyan nationals, to blow up bridges, conduct small-scale guerrilla operations and demonstrate that Kaddafi was opposed by an indigenous political force.”

Quite obviously this plan has been executed verbatim with the necessary addition of a NATO intervention to rescue the above stated “paramilitary” campaign from Libyan security forces – a contigency plan explicitly spelled out in another Wall Street-London subsidized, signed confession, Brookings Institution’s “Which Path to Persia?”

Using Military Force to Assist Popular Revolutions, page 109-110 (page 122-123 of the PDF): ”Consequently, if the United States ever succeeds in sparking a revolt against the clerical regime, Washington may have to consider whether to provide it with some form of military support to prevent Tehran from crushing it.” ”This requirement means that a popular revolution in Iran does not seem to fit the model of the “velvet revolutions” that occurred elsewhere. The point is that the Iranian regime may not be willing to go gently into that good night; instead, and unlike so many Eastern European regimes, it may choose to fight to the death. In those circumstances, if there is not external military assistance to the revolutionaries, they might not just fail but be massacred.

There is a human tragedy there, reported from wildly different perspectives, Gaddafi the “mad killer” or the rebels as “CIA/Al Qaeda” terrorists. Whatever the truth is, it will come out during the next two weeks. Gaddafi is gone, too late for those dedicated to saving him for whatever reason. We can wait for the results and hope some effort is made to help avert what is now becoming another tragedy, one of so many.

The big news coming up is the UN vote on Palestine. This would give the Palestinian people who were once the vast majority of the people of what is now called Israel a country of their own. It is our position at Veterans Today to support this effort because it is the right thing to do. This is the truth. The reality? What has been told to the people of the west by the news and popular culture about who Israel is and who the Palestinians are is false. It is a story invented to justify an apartheid state, stolen land and extremist policies. Israel has been bad. Americans have been lied to or fed a continual diet of “holocaust stories” as a form of mind control. Almost everything Israel has accused Nazi Germany of doing, they are doing, and doing it today. This is the truth and you won’t read it or see it anywhere but it is true just the same.

When hundreds of thousands of Israelis began protesting their own government, that had to be stopped. The timing was all wrong. Israel had to look “squeaky clean” for the UN vote and the big celebrations of 9/11.

How was it dealt with? Perfectly timed attacks hit Israel, exactly enough when backed by a barrage of propaganda to clear demonstrators off the streets, out of their “tent cities,” making them look foolish in the face of a “foreign threat.” Israel has done this dozens of times, even blowing up a bus filled with corpses flown in from Russia claiming it to be a “devastating terror attack.”

How many times have you heard the mainstream media dismiss certain points of view as "conspiracy theories"? It seems as though one of the easiest ways to brush something off is to label it as something that only "conspiracy theorists" would believe. Well, you know what? A whole lot of the time the "conspiracy theorists" are right and the mainstream media is wrong. In fact, we owe a great debt to "conspiracy theorists" because they will go places and investigate things that the mainstream media would never even touch. The reality is that the mainstream media only tells us what the government and the big corporations want us to hear, and much of the time it is those in the alternative media that are left with the task of trying to figure out what the real truth is. So don't look down on conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists. In a world where almost everything we are told is a lie, the truth can be very difficult to find.

The following are 14 conspiracy theories that the media now admits are conspiracy facts....

In 2008, the Libyan state oil company, National Oil, prepared a report on the subject in which officials suggested modifying the production-sharing agreements with foreign companies in order to increase state revenues.

As a result of these contract changes, Libya gained 5.4 billion dollars in oil revenues.

Some years ago, in the Indian site www.bharat-rakshak.com, this columnist had written of the NATO militaries as resembling an army of simians. Such a force - if let loose within a confined space – can create immense damage, but are unable to clean up the resultant mess. This is precisely what the world has witnessed in Iraq. Despite more than a decade of sanctions that directly resulted in nearly a million extra deaths during that period ( because of shortages created by the UN-approved measures), the regime of Saddam Hussein was able to provide food, energy and housing to the people of Iraq, whereas eight years after “liberation” by key NATO members, the country and its population are worse off than before the 2003 invasion that led to the execution of Saddam Hussein. As for Afghanistan, after a decade of the world’s most modern military force fighting against a ragtag band of insurgents, more than a third of the country is back in the hands of the Taliban, while a fifth of the rest is on the brink of a similar fate. As a consequence of its failure to subdue this force, NATO is desperately clutching at plans for engaging the “moderate Taliban”, an oxymoron if ever one was created.

Serbia has yet to recover from its brief burst of battle with NATO, and now Libya has joined the lengthening list of countries devastated by the attentions of NATO. Clearly, the top brass in a military alliance designed to do battle in Europe against the USSR were reluctant to close shop. They have therefore redesigned NATO as a military instrument with multiple uses, especially against “asymmetric threats”, a term which refers to countries that have ramshackle militaries. Both Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafy followed the dictates of the NATO powers in surrendering whatever WMD was in their possession, unlike Syria and North Korea, two countries that have been left undisturbed by NATO as a consequence. Clearly, military planners within the alliance are ready for action only against those rivals that have had their conventional capabilities degraded to the point at which they do not represent any significant risk against the alliance. Had George W Bush and Tony Blair truly believed their own rhetoric about Saddam Hussein having WMD, they would never have sent their armies into Iraq the way they did.

As mentioned in these columns, Gaddafy’s fate got sealed when he accepted the advice of his Europe-dazzled sons to disarm and place the survival of his regime in the hands of NATO. Since 2003, Muammar Gaddafy dismantled his WMD program, synchronised his intelligence services with that of NATO and generally accepted each of the prescriptions handed over to him. Had NATO been an alliance that respects reciprocity, all this ought to have made NATO turn as blind an eye to his battle with sections of the population as we have seen in the case of Bahrain, where the ruling family has been given a free hand to sort out the situation. Instead, the situation changed when Nicholas Sarkozy was informed by French banks that Colonel Gaddafy may withdraw the immense bank deposits of Libya from them to institutions in China, and when he learnt that several contracts that French enterprises were expecting to come to them would vanish because Gaddafy wanted to spend less on French military and other toys and more on social services. Libya had to be made an example of, lest other Arab governments think of shifting their money elsewhere than within the NATO bloc as a consequence of the loss of $1.3 trillion by the GCC and its people alone because of the financial fraud perpetrated in 2008 by banks and other financial entities headquartered within the NATO bloc.

These days, companies based within NATO are finding it difficult to retain the monopoly position they have enjoyed, sometimes for generations. In particular, Chinese companies are challenging them in numerous markets, as are companies based elsewhere in Asia, including within South Korea and India. As a consequence, they now rely on military force to retain their privileges. This has been illustrated with commendable transparency in the case of Iraq and Libya. In the latter case, even though the fumes of battle have not ceased (and are unlikely to), oil companies such as ENI and Total are hard at work figuring out the assets they can seize because of the local victories of the Sarkozy-appointed “National Transitional Council”. Interestingly, even though the NTC is a creation of Paris, the UN has accepted it as the legitimate government of Iraq. Indeed,in the 21st century the UN seems to have regressed into the period between 1919 and 1939,when the League of Nations awarded “mandates” to dominant countries that permitted them to rule weaker ones. In the past decade, similar mandates have been proferred in the case of Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan. In the case of Libya, President Sarkozy’s takeover of the Libyan state via the creation of the NTC has been similarly legitimized by the UN in an astonishing abdication of principle.

The corporate media has, once again, been caught acting as stenographers for the CIA-backed Libyan Interim National Transitional Council by echoing the rebel reports that Seif al Islam and Muhammad Qaddafi, two of Muammar Qaddafi’s sons, were captured. Seif and Muhammad were not captured and Seif has taken reporters around parts of Tripoli still held by Qaddafi forces. Tripoli has not fallen to the rebels.

The corporate media’s coverage of the Libyan rebels has, for the entirety of the NATO campaign against Libya, been noted for its one-sided coverage of the war. In the case of Libya, Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar, a NATO coalition partner in the war against Libya, has joined the BBC, France 24, Deustche Welle, and the US news networks in acting as virtual propaganda arms for the Libyan rebels, who have made the types of false claims that are reminiscent of “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam’s spokesman in Iraq, and Ahmad Chalabi, the con-artist who spoke to the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague also reported the sons’ capture, which makes practically every decision the ICC has made on trials of former leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, DR Congo, and Liberia subject to extreme suspicion.

In the record of the CIA’s sordid operations in the Middle East, Operation Desert Storm led to Operation Iraqi Freedom and finally, Operation Mermaid Dawn, the capture of Tripoli by Libyan rebel forces. One of the casualties of Mermaid Dawn will be the continued secrecy of the power politics that led to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and now NATO’s proxies’ invasion and occupation of Libya.

David Ray Griffen has written 10 carefully researched books documenting problems in the government’s account. Scientists have pointed out that the government has no explanation for the molten steel. NIST has been forced to admit that WTC 7 was in free fall for part of its descent, and a scientific team led by a professor of nano-chemistry at the University of Copenhagen has reported finding nano-thermite in the dust from the buildings.

Larry Silverstein, who had the lease on the World Trade Center buildings, said in a PBS broadcast that the decision was made “to pull” Building 7 late in the afternoon of 9/11. Chief fire marshals have said that no forensic investigation was made of the buildings’ destruction and that the absence of investigation was a violation of law.

The US government’s account of 9/11 is the foundation of the open-ended wars that are exhausting America’s resources and destroying its reputation, and it is the foundation of the domestic police state that ultimately will shut down all opposition to the wars. Americans are bound to the story of the 9/11 Muslim terrorist attack, because it is what justifies the slaughter of civilian populations in several Muslim countries, and it justifies a domestic police state as the only means of securing safety from terrorists, who already have morphed into “domestic extremists” such as environmentalists, animal rights groups, and antiwar activists.

Today Americans are unsafe, not because of terrorists and domestic extremists, but because they have lost their civil liberties and have no protection from unaccountable government power. One would think that how this came about would be worthy of public debate and congressional hearings.

In February 2011 we were told by Western media that the Arab Spring had reached Libya. However, those paying attention to details, noticed something odd in the reports: the so called “popular protests” began by a group of rebels taking control of areas next to the Egyptian border. In May the rebels took the city of Misrata and things began looking bad for Muammar Gaddafi’s government. Yesterday, August 23, the rebels took control of the almost destroyed by NATO bombings, Bab al-Aziziya government complex in Tripoli. Gaddafi escaped to a still unknown location. Instead of a popular rebellion, we are watching the advance of an unknown infantry army backed up by the air force of Nato’s Terror Marshals. In the West, the rebels became known as the “National Transitional Council (NTC)” and were recognized as Libya’s legal government for unclear reasons; after all they have not been elected by the people. Opposing the barbaric and massive attacks of NATO on civilians were China, Russia and Venezuela among others.

Making accusations of a Zionist intervention in Libya could be easily classified as “another baseless conspiracy theory” and dismissed. Yet, the rebels spokesmen gave today (Aug 24) an incredible interview to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Let’s remember Libya has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Thus, Yossi Melman – the journalist to whom the interview was given – broke Israeli law. Since he has not been detained and the interview was published, we can safely deduce the event was sanctioned by the Shin Beth. This is enough to make the event a bombshell, even if the interview had been centered about the color of Libyan skies. It contained much more than that.

“We are asking Israel to use its influence in the international community to end the tyrannical regime of Gaddafi and his family…” Ahmad Shabani told to Haaretz. In other words, the spokesman of the rebels – or the Libyan government recognized by the US and a few other rogue states – recognizes Israel (otherwise it wouldn’t be asking for things from it) and ignores the Palestinians. To put it mildly, I’m not sure the Libyan people support this odd policy.

At this point I thought nothing could surprise me in the interview, but Ahmad Shabani was on fire. He was asked if the Rebel Libya would recognize Israel. “That is a very sensitive question. The question is whether Israel will recognize us.” Mr Ahmad Shabani, you are wrong. The real question is: Is Israel Sovereign? Again, I’m not sure the Libyan people support Shabani’s odd policies. Is he a member of B’nei Brit?

Then, Shabani revealed himself as little more than a Zionist mercenary. Some months ago, the Shin Beth and the IDF claimed to the Hebrew media that weapons were being smuggled from Libya to the Gaza Strip via post-Mubarak’s Egypt. In today’s interview, Shabani said the rebels were aware of the smuggling and hoped to end it.

No surprises here; the new Libya is a Zionist Libya, ruled by a foreign mercenary army. As Afghanistan and Iraq, it would become another Western Swamp. Tribal societies won’t be eradicated in the name of cheap oil. Actually it works the other way around. Tribal societies would destroy Empire by imposing unbearable military costs on it.

We are steamrolling toward a massive global debt meltdown, and at this point world leaders seem to be all out of solutions. Over the last 30 years or so, the greatest debt bubble in the history of the planet has produced unprecedented prosperity in the western world. But now that debt bubble is starting to burst and the bills are coming due. Many believe that "ground zero" for the coming global debt meltdown will be in Europe. Unlike the U.S. and Japan, the nations of the EU can't just print more money to cover their debts. Nations such as Greece, Portugal and Italy must repay their debts in euros, and those nations are rapidly getting to the point where their debts are going to overwhelm them. Unfortunately, major banks all over Europe are very highly leveraged and are also very heavily invested in the sovereign debt of nations such as Greece, Portugal and Italy. If even one EU nation defaults it will start tipping over financial dominoes. If more than one EU nation defaults it could cause a cataclysmic wave of bank failures all over Europe.

But Germany and the other more financially stable countries of the EU cannot bail out nations like Greece, Portugal and Italy indefinitely. Pouring money into Greece is like pouring money into a black hole. When you take money from financially stable countries and pour it into hopeless messes, you may stabilize things for a little while, but you also cause the financial condition of the financially stable nations to start deteriorating.

Right now, the yield on 2 year Greek bonds is up to 44%. Basically, the market is screaming that these are horrible investments and that they will almost certainly default.

Greece cannot fire up the printing presses and print more money, so they are now totally dependent on others to bail them out.

If Greece does default, it is going to have dramatic consequences all over Europe. For a chilling look at what could potentially happen when Greece defaults, just check out this article by John Mauldin.

Racing desperately against both an approaching deadline on their mandate and their departing credibility, NATO is desperately declaring victory in Libya regardless of what the facts on the ground may be. Parading before the public, videos of rebels looting empty compounds and dancing briefly in a square that may or may not have even been in the country, NATO's declaration of victory teeters entirely on the corporate-media's ability to obfuscate what is obviously a citywide battle overturning earlier rebel "gains" in Tripoli.

While NATO is under no delusions as to how tenuous their ongoing murder spree is in Libya, their psychological warfare and claims of a decisive victory for NATO-backed rebels were shattered when Saif al-Islam reappeared after the ICC "confirmed" he was captured by rebels, and began leading a counterattack that has now drawn out for nearly a week. Despite herculean feats of wishful thinking on the globalists' behalf, the battle for Tripoli and greater Libya is still on.

Voice of America, a US State Department mouthpiece, conceded Wednesday that Qaddafi's troops were holding and contesting multiple locations across the capital of Tripoli and still held entire cities along both Libya's coast and throughout the nation's vast interior. With NATO already declaring victory within the realm of these glaring facts, it appears as if NATO is merely rushing to the next phase of their war of aggression - the occupation, which by necessity will require an initial invasion and the establishment of a "Green-Zone" to protect NATO's rebel proxies.

As the corporate-financier-funded Atlantic Council both "congratulates" NATO and celebrates Obama's ability to lead America "into battle without the hard work of securing authorization from a partisan Congress," we see just how far and how recklessly the globalists have gone in pursuit of global hegemony. They have explicitly declared that Libya is a matter of establishing the primacy of international law over the sovereignty of the nation-state and that failure would balk their plans to proceed on toward Syria, Iran, and beyond to Russia and China's peripheries before ultimately undermining and collapsing Moscow and Beijing. With this much at stake, despite endless promises that "boots on the ground" was a hysterical conspiracy theory, we will undoubtedly see NATO troops landing in Libya and occupying Tripoli. There is no lie too big, nor a transgression against humanity too egregious that can confine the globalists' ambitions now, only direct, concerted opposition to their agenda.

Think of the new Libya as the latest spectacular chapter in the Disaster Capitalism series. Instead of weapons of mass destruction, we had R2P ("responsibility to protect"). Instead of neo-conservatives, we had humanitarian imperialists.

But the target is the same: regime change. And the project is the same: to completely dismantle and privatize a nation that was not integrated into turbo-capitalism; to open another (profitable) land of opportunity for turbocharged neo-liberalism. The whole thing is especially handy because it is smack in the middle of a nearly global recession.

It will take some time; Libyan oil won't totally return to the market within 18 months. But there's the reconstruction of everything the

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombed (well, not much of what the Pentagon bombed in 2003 was reconstructed in Iraq ...)

Anyway - from oil to rebuilding - in thesis juicy business opportunities loom. France's neo-Napoleonic Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's David of Arabia Cameron believe they will be especially well positioned to profit from NATO's victory. Yet there's no guarantee the new Libyan bonanza will be enough to lift both former colonial powers (neo-colonials?) out of recession.

Everything we have been told, from President Obama's teleprompter readings to Luis Moreno-Ocampo of the ICC's claims of Saif's "confirmed" capture, to the mainstream media and the Al Qaeda infested "Transitional National Council" are now systematically being exposed as overt, verified lies as part of what may be the biggest psychological operation in modern history. Al Jazeera who was already featuring lofty "The Last Days of Gaddafi" narratives is now forced to face reality and irrefutable evidence that the rebel operations in Tripoli were clearly over-hyped war propaganda and the reality is Qaddafi and the Libyan people have called NATO's bluff.

To illustrate just how absurd the Western media has become as their lies break upon the rocks of reality, a recent farcical attempt to save face regarding Saif's appearance before journalists at the Riox included an Al Jazeera report claiming that rebel leaders had confirmation Saif al-Islam was arrested "but have no idea how he escaped." To help out the media it might be suggested that Saif was never captured in the first place and that reports of his arrest were simply a ploy to embolden rebels and make it appear as if the momentum had swung in favor of NATO. (For more on US State Department lies rehashed through "media" please see: "Libyan Rebels Lying Left and Right")

When we see Reuters sitting side-by-side oil giants like BP, Exxon, Chevron within the halls of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Chatham House and then see reports gloating over Western oil companies moving in to replace Chinese and Russian investments in Libya, their duplicity and lack of independence in their reporting becomes glaringly obvious. These media organizations are in fact PR fronts for the Fortune 500 and their collective goal of implementing a global empire, nation to nation. For now, they are currently obsessed over Libya and the implications its conclusion will have on their future planned conquests, the next being Syria.

It would be a good idea for those following the current NATO murder spree in Libya to abandon any trust in Reuters, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, and any of the "reputable" newspapers wasting paper and space on our nations' newsstands, all of whose fates are tied directly to the corporate-financier interests pinning their hopes on a NATO victory in Libya. Instead, we must commit ourselves to vetting reliable alternative news sources as well as committing ourselves to the responsible of researching the news of the day on our own. Let this be proof positive as to how essential it is to boycott and replace everything eminating from the Fortune 500 including their army of professional liars also known as the "mainstream media."

Using data obtained (circa 2007) from the Orbis database (a global database containing financial information on public and private companies) the team, in what is being heralded as the first of its kind, analyzed data from over 43,000 corporations, looking at both upstream and downstream connections between them all and found that when graphed, the data represented a bowtie of sorts, with the knot, or core representing just 147 entities who control nearly 40 percent of all of monetary value of transnational corporations (TNCs).

In this analysis the focus was on corporations that have ownership in their own assets as well as those of other institutions and who exert influence via ownership in second, third, fourth, etc. tier entities that hold influence over others in the web, as they call it; the interconnecting network of TNCs that together make up the whole of the largest corporations in the world. In analyzing the data they found, and then in building the network maps, the authors of the report sought to uncover the structure and control mechanisms that make up the murky world of corporate finance and ownership.

To zero in on the significant controlling corporations, the team started with a list of 43,060 TNCs taken from a sample of 30 million economic “actors” in the Orbis database. They then applied a recursive algorithm designed to find and point out all of the ownership pathways between them all. The resulting TNC network produced a graph with 600,508 nodes and 1,006,987 ownership connections. The team then graphed the results in several different ways to show the different ways that corporate ownership is held; the main theme in each, showing that just a very few corporations through direct and indirect ownership (via stocks, bonds, etc.) exert tremendous influence over the actions of those corporations, which in turn exert a huge impact on the rest of us.

The authors conclude their report by asking, perhaps rhetorically, what are the implications of having so few exert so much influence, and perhaps more importantly, in an economic sense, what the implications are of such a structure on market competitiveness.

Presently, ZATO is performing mass murder upon the people of Libya, who don’t have the proper banking scheme and whose leader wanted to organize the African nations to protect their resources and reject the debt enslavement, visited upon them by London bankers and assorted true vampires in search of plunder, death and destruction, in any order; it doesn’t matter. ZATO is the Zionist Alliance for Total Occupation. It has been misidentified for a long time as The North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Even a casual observation of their activities over recent times will disabuse you of the notion that they work for anyone but the central bankers of London and Tel Aviv. New York City is a secondary location that is controlled by the aforementioned.

ZATO and one of their media constructs, CNN, are shooting at and threatening independent journalists in Libya for reporting actual events, instead of bending over for the official pronouncements of The Powers that Seem. It’s all a matter of degrees of subtlety, in terms of applied murder, whether it’s ZATO or Kardashian. However, dead is dead, today, tomorrow or on any given Sunday.

Zionism is applied Satanism for social and political gain at the expense of EVERYONE else. The club of anti-Semitism designed by Theodor Hertzl for the purpose of a defense against all criticism and to be used at any time without reason or basis, is the chief weapon of Zionism. As you have heard them say, “it’s a trick, we always use it”. Given what we have seen and are presently being oppressed by, it stands to reason that anti-Semitism is a badge of honor in the awareness of a clear and present danger that has been with us for a long, long time. The Apocalypse is making this more widely known and at some point it will combust, to the enduring dismay of those who thought they could always count on murder and lies to achieve their ends.

What is happening in Libya, will be happening somewhere else tomorrow and eventually it will be happening in your neighborhood because you didn’t care when it was happening to someone else and even supported it, if it meant you could have your share and get your fill of as many of the thousand forms of shit that is possible for you. Bon voyage, as you sail away in the burning dumpsters of flaming shit. There are handkerchiefs waving from the shore, as you sail off into the darkness of the sea of ignominy.

Antiwar.com has a troubling story detailing how what appears to be either an FBI counterintelligence investigation of suspected Israeli spies or an attempt to track down everyone who had posted terrorist watch lists online led to the FBI to investigate the site and Justin Raimondo and Eric Garris.

The story is troubling for several reasons:

1.The report on Antiwar.com reveals the FBI’s Electronic Communications Unit (the same one involved in using exigent letters to get community of interest phone numbers) was already monitoring Antiwar.com when the FBI did a threat analysis of them in 2004.

2.Based on the fact that they had posted two watch lists, that a number of people under investigation read the site, and other redacted reasons, the FBI recommended a preliminary investigation into whether (basically) they were spying.

3.The report cited electronic communications collected under FISA. While that may be no more than 4 FISA references in another case out of the Newark Office (which appears to be a prior investigation tied to the Israelis), that’s not clear that that’s the only FISA-collected information here.

4.Whether or not the FBI already had used FISA on Antiwar.com, the low bar for PATRIOT powers (connection to a counterterrorist or counterintelligence investigation; the Israeli investigation would qualify) means the government could have used PATRIOT powers to investigate them.

The Palestine Civil Rights Campaign-Lebanon confirms reports that Franklin Lamb was shot at approximately 11:45 a.m. on Sunday August 21 in Tripoli, Libya outside of the Corinthia Hotel where he has been staying.

Franklin P. Lamb, LLM,PhD is the Director of Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, Wash.DC-Beirut. Lamb is doing research as a board member for the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign-Lebanon in Libya.

Lamb has covered the unfolding situation in Libya as a contributing writer to this website and many others.

PCRC tells Activist Post that Franklin had just returned from a 90 minute bicycle tour of central Tripoli and was walking past the hotel swimming pool when he was hit in his right leg.

Witnesses report having seen sniper fire coming from the roof of the Marriott Hotel across from the Corinthia.

Franklin is reportedly doing well. The bullet has been removed and he is resting comfortably. PCRC said Lamb wishes that no one be concerned and that he will be fine.

It's unclear whether Lamb was targeted for his highly-critical reporting of NATO as the aggressor in Libya.

It's also reported that Internet has been cut in Tripoli, so reports are likely to be delayed inside Libya.

Plans are afoot to push the United States into an attack on Iran. Anyone knowing the political atmosphere would believe this impossible unless something really terrible were to happen.

No nation on earth, we should believe, would ever stage such an event, dirty bomb or even full scale nuclear attack, as nothing less than that could push Americans to war, not an America very skeptical of 9/11 and its aftermath.

Since 1999, confirmed as the year that the invasion of Iran was decided upon by Israel and their key allies in the US, the “neocons,” world events have been dominated by attempts to pre-stage a massive war.But the enemy is nearly unassailable, geographically isolated, armed to the teeth and closely aligned with China, the world’s second military power, the nation with the stranglehold on America’s credit purse strings.

9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq were just “run ups” to the Iran invasion that never materialized in 2005 like Bush had planned, pushed forward by a “false flag” terror attack in Bahrain the White House and JSOC had attempted, thwarted by patriotic American military leaders.

None of this is news, none is history, all is, however, very easy to document though some of those involved in thwarting the Bush plan have been assassinated and others put on “terror suspect” lists. Now we see it all heating up again.

This is what we have been saying for years! Why aren’t “progressives” supporting Ron Paul? He is REALLY Anti intervention, will REALLY end wars (O’Bomba and Clinton are saber rattling with Syria today) and Dr Paul will stop the obscene transfer of wealth to Oligarchs! (Robber Barons) So what is the problem? (Abortion and taxes?)

Far from “populist” thinking progressives – “MSNBC-GE-Comcast” even used the Perry snafu to lobby for MORE Quantitative Easing (printing money) while talking down do anyone who might disagree with the Fed. Bill Maher has done the same while pimping for even more Keynesian economics!

Taibbi has been one of our biggest critics over the years on Truth issues, but recently has been getting it right in a BIG way. His expose’ on Goldman Sachs (Obama Admin is littered with GS heads, worse than even George Bush…) was ground-breaking…. and now Taibbi takes on the Federal Reserve (while scolding Perry for his giving the anti Fed movement a black eye).

Perry is FULL OF SHITE! I live in Texas and should know. Perry is nothing but a Stuffed suit, Phony, Lip service candidate, and indulges in headline grabbing, and an Operation Chaos style of campaigning (he was clearly beaten in last years GOP TX Primary by Debra Medina until Media operatives (Urged on by Sen Dan Patrick) stepped in to save him…

So is Rick Perry “sincere” about shutting down the Fed’s counterfeiting operation? Here is Perry getting sleazed by a B of A frontman yesterday. (There is more of this coming out) None of these Wall St Whores that assist or donate to Obama / Perry / Romney… Never does a thing for Ron Paul. Does that tell you anything? ~ Jack Blood

On August 8, the libertarian Reason Foundation (RF) asked about the absence of anti-war sentiment in America, saying:

"The Obama administration is on pace to have more American soldiers killed in" Iraq and Afghanistan than Bush did in his first term.

Besides the shocking number of injuries, permanent impairments, physical trauma, and record number of suicides because of lengthy repeated deployments, iCasualties.org listed 630 Afghan deaths from 2001 through 2008 under Bush.

Since Obama took office, it's 1,112 (plus another unconfirmed two dozen or more on August 18) and counting. Deaths also mount in Iraq, though smaller numbers. Most get scant, if any media attention. As a result, RF asked:

"First, where are the antiwar protests? And second, where is the press?"

Jason Linkins reports that D.C. is the only place where people think the economy is just dandy, since that's where the politicos, lobbyists, and people looking for big handouts live:

A less remarked-upon bit of polling from Gallup is this bit here, in which they set out to gauge the nation's "economic confidence." What they found was remarkably consistent -- state by state, there are more people lacking in confidence than there are people who feel the economy has turned around.
So once again, the real story is, "Terrible Economy Presents Problems For Ordinary Americans." But if you don't see those stories, there's a reason why, and it has everything to do with the one outlier in Gallup's findings. If you want a hint as to where that outlier is, consider this: every single one of this poll's respondents said they were currently employed. In every state, Gallup spoke to people who are at least fortunate enough to have a job ("87,634 employed adults, aged 18 and older, conducted from January-June 2011").

So with that in mind, what part of America do you imagine has the highest concentration of employed people who don't have personal relationships with people who are unemployed?

Yes, it seems that the one and only place in America where anyone has any confidence in the economy also happens to be Washington, D.C., home to political elites, the media that covers them, the people who win the relevant contracts and the people who feather their nests lobbying for the laws that impact the other United (in their lack of economic confidence) States Of America.

After tiptoeing toward demanding the ouster of Bashar al-Assad over the past several months, United States President Barack Obama on Thursday finally jumped over the line with his first explicit call for the Syrian president to resign.

"The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way," Obama said in a statement released by the White House. "For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside."

Obama's statement was followed by the imposition of sweeping economic sanctions, including a freeze on all Syrian state assets

under US jurisdiction and a total ban on US companies and citizens conducting any business with Damascus.

Because US commercial relations with Syria are negligible, however, administration officials said they hoped Washington's latest steps would be replicated by the European Union (EU), whose economic ties with Damascus - particularly in the energy field - are far more significant, when its senior diplomatic officials meet in Brussels on Friday.

For decades the U.S. military has waged clandestine war on virtually every continent on the globe, but, for the first time, high-ranking Special Operations Forces (SOF) officers are moving out of the shadows and into the command mainstream. Their emergence suggests the U.S. is embarking on a military sea change that will replace massive deployments, like Iraq and Afghanistan, with stealthy night raids, secret assassinations, and death-dealing drones. Its implications for civilian control of foreign policy promises to be profound.

Early this month, Vice Adm. Robert Harward—a former commander of the SEALs—the Navy's elite SOF that recently killed al-Qaeda leader Osma bin Laden—was appointed deputy commander of Central Command, the military region that embraces the Middle East and Central Asia. Another SEAL commander, Vice Adm. Joseph Kernan, took over the number two spot in Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Obama Administration has been particularly enamored of SOFs, and, according to reporters Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post, is in the process of doubling the number of countries where such units are active from 60 to 120. U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Col. Tim Nye told Nick Turse of Salon that SOF forces would soon be deployed in 60 percent of the world's nations: "We do a lot of traveling."

Indeed they do. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOC) admits to having forces in virtually every country in the Middle East, Central Asia, as well as many in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. But true to its penchant for secrecy, SOC is reluctant to disclose every country to which its forces are deployed. "We're obviously going to have some places where it's not advantageous for us to list where were at," Nye told Turse.

It is no hyperbole to say that the vast majority of today's churches do not remotely resemble the New Testament pattern. In the first place, the Church was never intended to be a government corporation! Yet, that is exactly what every 501c3 non-profit "religious" organization is: it is a government-created corporation. In the eyes of the government, pastors, elders, and deacons are not pastors, elders, and deacons; they are corporate officers. And put to the test, virtually any and all of these so-called "pastors," "elders," and "deacons," will confirm that they are corporate officers. So, right out of the gate we must understand that we are dealing with government corporations and corporate officers, not with New Testament churches, pastors, elders, and deacons.

Pray tell, where do you find anything in the New Testament about churches joining with the State, or being incorporated by the State, or being required to submit to the State? It's not there! The 501c3 corporation status has turned the Lord's Church into mere creatures of the State.

Therefore, please remember, when you "worship" inside these government corporations, when you give your tithes and offerings to these government corporations, you are NOT supporting "the Lord's work." You are supporting the work of the State. You might as well be paying taxes; it amounts to virtually the same thing. The same is true for all these TV preachers. They are all 501c3 incorporated!

This is why many pastors do not speak out on the burning issues of the day. This is why neither he nor his church will take a stand for anything. This is why he won't "get involved in politics." He is a corporate officer of the State, and he will not jeopardize his standing as such.

This unholy alliance between the Lord's Church and Caesar, between the Body of Christ and Beelzebub, between the fellowship of God and the fellowship of Satan is plaguing our nation, our families, and our future. "Come out of her, my people."

Daniel Cohen: Dear Gilad, we certainly share many ideas and thoughts. We both oppose Zionism and Israeli policies, however, rather, too often, you fail to be careful enough with your formulations, and this gives room for some misunderstandings. You seem to challenge some issues to do with the Holocaust, and history in general. It seems to me as if, often enough, you raise questions to which various sufficient answers already exist.

Gilad Atzmon: I can already tell you, at this stage, that I have a slight problem with your approach. To start with, as a philosopher, I am far more interested in the art of asking questions. I leave the ‘answers’ to politicians. Moreover, the relationship between questions and answers is paradigmatically oriented. A sufficient ‘answer’ within one paradigm (or discourse) may as well be totally inadequate or irrelevant within another -a certain ‘answer’ within Aristotelian physics may well be within the realm of the inexpressible within a ‘Newtonian’ paradigm.

Daniel: If you ask, for instance, why were the Jews repeatedly hated in so many places along their history, as you do in some of your texts, you create room for anti-Semites who may say it is because they are intrinsically evil.

Gilad: To start with, as a thinking being full of curiosity, I do not take instructions from anti Semites or Zionists or Jewish anti Zionist campaigners. I instead follow my instincts and go along with my sincere ethically driven truth-seeking adventure. Also, I believe that the answer you attributed to anti Semites can be easily addressed. Jews cannot be ‘intrinsically evil’ because Jews do not form a racial or ethnic continuum. Any racial attribution to Jews is clearly wrong and silly.

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency's records – "including case files relating to preliminary investigations" – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term "Orwellian," devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or "Matters Under Inquiry" – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission's internal website. "After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation," the site advised staffers, "you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI."

Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.

The Western media has played a central role in obfuscating the nature of foreign interference in Syria including outside support to armed insurgents. In chorus they have described recent events in Syria as a "peaceful protest movement" directed against the government of Bashar Al Assad, when the evidence amply confirms that Islamic paramilitary groups have infiltrated the rallies.

In recent developments, Islamist death squads have penetrated the port city of Latakia's Ramleh district, which includes a Palestinian refugee camp of some 10,000 residents. These armed gunmen which include rooftop snipers are terrorizing the local population.

In a cynical twist, the Western media has presented the Islamist paramilitary groups in Latakia as "Palestinian dissidents" and "activists" defending themselves against the Syrian armed forces. In this regard, the actions of armed gangs directed against the Palestinian community in Ramleh visibly seeks to foment political conflict between Palestine and Syria. Several Palestinian personalities have sided with the Syrian "protest movement", while casually ignoring the fact that the "pro-democracy" death squads are covertly supported by Israel and Turkey.

Were a military operation to be launched against Syria, the broader Middle East Central Asian region extending from North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with China would be engulfed in the turmoil of an extended war. A war on Syria could evolve towards a US-NATO military campaign directed against Iran, in which Turkey and Israel would be directly involved.

It is crucial to spread the word and break the channels of media disinformation.

A critical and unbiased understanding of what is happening in Syria is of crucial importance in reversing the tide of military escalation towards a broader regional war.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern makes two prescient observations about the Zionist-Central Banking-War Party’s drive to incite an American-Israeli conflict with Iran, aside from the sheer insanity and immorality of the proposition itself.

The first is that Fawning Corporate Media (FCM), as McGovern aptly tabs it, virtually never covers the real story, or gets it right. The late William Colby told me much the same thing over 30 years ago, in greater detail. Colby flatly stated in the late 1970s that Corporate Media is totally at the behest of the American National Security Establishment, Central Banks, and Multinational Consortiums. Once it is understood who the Masters of Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) are, the methodology and the game plan become clearer. Seen through these lenses, FCM’s failures in covering what the public has a right to know are no longer attributable to sheer incompetence, but to deliberate demonic design.

Any analysis of an FCM newspaper, television show, magazine, or Internet site will reveal the basics of how the game is played. FCM either: 1) fails to report the real story of any given day or week; 2) buries the real story without comment or explanatory context on the back page of the paper/magazine or in the filler section of a telecast; or 3) reports the real story with the prominent lead story status it deserves, but with a manipulation of the data and a false spin on what the data means, provided by news anchors, columnists, and editors, whose handsomely paid corporate salaries depend on serving as a conduit for the deliberately deceptive, proffered at the direction of The Masters.

The creation of an external enemy, followed by a manufactured incident with The Masters behind the curtain, is one of the oldest tricks of the trade in history. When you hear a new version of Remember Pearl Harbor playing on the radio after an American-Israeli war with Iran commences, either before November of 2012 or after a Presidential inauguration in 2013, remember the warning you are reading this day.

As for the American people, if they want a real war the enemy is not Iran and the Iranian people. If there is a fight worth fighting, it is in reclaiming our nation’s political, cultural, and economic landscape from the same sorts of thieves who have been robbing Palestinians blind since 1948. They have been robbing Americans of their Old Republic throughout the 20th century, with nary a domestic uprising.

Are you ready for Big Brother 2.0? If you think that the hundreds of ways that the government watches, monitors, tracks and controls us now are bad, just wait until you see what is coming. We live in an age when paranoia is running wild. As technology continues to develop at an exponential pace, governments all over the globe are going to discover a multitude of new ways to spy on us and control our behavior. In a world where everyone is a "potential terrorist", we are told that things like liberty, freedom and privacy are "luxuries" that we can no longer afford. We are assured that if we just allow the government to watch all of us and investigate all of us that somehow that will keep us all safe. But it isn't just the government that is watching us. Now we are being taught to spy on one another and to report any trace of "suspicious activity" to the government immediately. The entire civilized world is being transformed into one giant prison grid, and many of the new technologies that are now being introduced are going to make things even worse.

#1 Are you ready for "electronic skin tattoos"? One team of researchers has created an extremely thin, extremely flexible "smart skin" that will open up a whole new world of possibilities. Wearing "skin-mounted electronics" might seem like a great idea to tech geeks, but it also could create a whole lot of new problems. The following is how an article in one UK newspaper described this new breakthrough....

#2 According to a shocking document obtained by Oath Keepers, the FBI is now instructing store owners to report many new forms of "suspicious activity" to them. According to the document, "suspicious activity" now includes....

#3 The U.S. military has developed an invisible "pain ray" that is remarkably effective. The following is how a recent article posted on Alternet described this weapon....

#4 Be careful about what you put up on Facebook or Twitter. Law enforcement agencies all over the globe are now focusing on social media as never before. For example, the NYPD has just created a special "social media" unit dedicated to looking for criminals on Facebook and Twitter.

81 members of Congress are now in Israel on an all-expense paid junket sponsored by Aipac’s nominally non-profit American-Israel Education Foundation. The value of the trip for the member and spouse is $8,000, meaning Aipac is forking over nearly $700,000 to fund this massive hasbara undertaking.

In the interest of transparency and knowing where our tax dollars are spent, I thought it would be important to list every name of every junketeer so their constituents can know that their member is on the pro-Israel gravy train. Here are the 33 I’ve discovered so far (please add more in the thread below):

Finally, there is the ethical and legal dimension of the junket that is deeply disturbing. Congress members are not allowed to take such trips if sponsored by groups which employ registered lobbyists, which Aipac does. So to get around the law, Aipac established AIEF as a 501c3 which has no lobbyists on its payroll. In fact, AIEF has NO employees on its payroll according to its IRS 990 report. Aipac “lends” AIEF its staff to organize these grand tours of the Israeli heartland. Because members may accept trips from non-profits, they can do a legal end around ethics laws by lining up at the AIEF trough for a generous feeding.

So what does $700,000 buy for a lobbying group these days? It buys tons of meaningless ‘sense of Congress’ resolutions that buttress every wild-eyed pet project and policy Aipac is peddling. These resolutions prove nothing to anyone except that they give Aipac’s donors a sense of their own power in wielding clubs over their captive Congressional audience. I suppose for the group these junkets are an insurance policy in case Bibi and his far right government ever really need Congress’ help in swatting away a real threat to Likud hegemony–like a UN vote for Palestinian statehood or a concerted international BDS campaign which gained traction and posed a significant financial threat to Israel. Then Aipac could pull out all the stops to obstruct Obama (if he ever dared to do such a thing) from crossing Israel in a truly serious way.

The issue isn’t whether human rights are important but whether supporting unrest in repressive states automatically strengthens human rights. An important example was Iran in 1979, when opposition to the oppression of the shah’s government was perceived as a movement toward liberal democracy. What followed might have been democratic but it was hardly liberal. Indeed, many of the myths of the Arab Spring had their roots both in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and later in Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, when a narrow uprising readily crushed by the regime was widely viewed as massive opposition and widespread support for liberalization.

The world is more complicated and more varied than that. As we saw in the Arab Spring, oppressive regimes are not always faced with massed risings, and unrest does not necessarily mean mass support. Nor are the alternatives necessarily more palatable than what went before or the displeasure of the West nearly as fearsome as Westerners like to think. Libya is a case study on the consequences of starting a war with insufficient force. Syria makes a strong case on the limits of soft power. Egypt and Tunisia represent a textbook lesson on the importance of not deluding yourself.

The pursuit of human rights requires ruthless clarity as to whom you are supporting and what their chances are. It is important to remember that it is not Western supporters of human rights who suffer the consequences of failed risings, civil wars or revolutionary regimes that are committed to causes other than liberal democracy.

The misreading of the situation can also create unnecessary geopolitical problems. The fall of the Egyptian regime, unlikely as it is at this point, would be just as likely to generate an Islamist regime as a liberal democracy. The survival of the Assad regime could lead to more slaughter than we have seen and a much firmer base for Iran. No regimes have fallen since the Arab Spring, but when they do it will be important to remember 1979 and the conviction that nothing could be worse than the shah’s Iran, morally or geopolitically. Neither was quite the case.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t people in the Arab world who want liberal democracy. It simply means that they are not powerful enough to topple regimes or maintain control of new regimes even if they did succeed. The Arab Spring is, above all, a primer on wishful thinking in the face of the real world.

Since the summer of 2005, when I began a camp in front of the vacation “ranch” of George Bush, I have traveled to many countries and all over the U.S. meeting with people who have been in long struggles against neoliberalism. Most of us in the U.S. are familiar with the term “neoconservative,” but “neoliberal” is also a well-understood and often used term in other areas.

Wikipedia has a very good explanation of neoliberalism:

The term “neoliberalism” has also come into wide use in cultural studies to describe an internationally prevailing ideological paradigm that leads to social, cultural, and political practices and policies that use the language of markets, efficiency, consumer choice, transactional thinking and individual autonomy to shift risk from governments and corporations onto individuals and to extend this kind of market logic into the realm of social and affective relationships.

Opponents of neoliberalism would identify several enemy organizations that foster global neoliberalism: the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the U.S. Military—not to mention the collusion of most governments with private corporations in this headlong rush to economic disaster.

What I observe in the U.S. is the financial chickens coming home to roost after decades’ long foreign expansion and wars. I firmly believe that Barack Obama was (s)elected to put a minority face on this expansion to help quell rising protests against the aggressive wars abroad and the war against the poor here at home. Everything he has done during his disastrous first term in office has been done to shore up the economic defenses of the economic elite: expand wars, TARP, health care “reform” bill, bankster bailouts, and the recent debt ceiling debacle.

In a world rife with examples of the damage done to the U.S. economy and our national security by Washington’s relentless and bipartisan overseas interventionism, two current situations can be cited to demonstrate the high cost of intervention, on the one hand, and the wisdom of national-interest-protecting non-intervention on the other.

The first deals with the growing likelihood of frequent and widespread attacks in the United States by Islamist militants, and the second deals with recent events in Syria and Somalia. The coming Islamist attacks in America will be the direct result of our interventionist foreign policy, while our failure to intervene — so far — in Syria and Somalia provides clears evidence that disasters, insurrections, and wars can occur in many areas of the world, have no impact on U.S. national security, and will cost us nothing in terms of lives, funds, or security if we simply refrain from intervening.

Years ago, Ralph Peters, one of America’s finest strategists, wrote that in the post-Cold War world Americans would have to learn to watch foreigners die with equanimity to avoid involvement in expensive, endless wars in which no U.S. national interests are at risk. That advice was wise then; it is even more sage today. Neither the price of bread, the status of our liberties, the baseball pennant races, nor the security of our shores has been adversely affected by our failure to ride to the rescue of the dying in Syria and Somalia. The foreigners die, life goes on, and America is not yet fighting a war in either country, which is as it should be as no national interest is in danger in either place. Washington’s failure to intervene or lead a Western intervention in Syria or Somalia may not be popular with the electronic and print media and cultural war-mongers like Obama and Mrs. Clinton, but for the rest of us it is a most positive failure, one that has paid dividends by avoiding additional wars with the Muslim world and the deaths and enormous monetary costs such conflicts would entail. Failing to intervene also helps domestic U.S. security by not sharpening the already deep-seated hatred of U.S.-citizen Muslims for their government’s foreign policy. In these ways, it seems clear that non-intervention protects Americans and their genuine interests.

Now the minorities the Jews used to take it from New England hate Jews, openly and with a passion.

What we call conservatives want the country back in New England hands. Those we call liberals want it back in Jewish hands.

Here is the Whitakerism: You can get more out of analyzing the few sentences above than by reading a hundred tomes.

But reading tomes isn’t WORK. You can just sit there with your mouth open and go through words. Every second of taking a few short sentences like this apart and fitting or contrasting them with reality is WORK.

The current civil unrest in Britain has been carefully staged by the government and security services working in concert with news media, Israeli intelligence and the a parallel government, a Freemason organization now believed to have planned and executed the Norway killings with full complicity of police, courts and security apparatus.

A quick look around the world gives us a picture worth noting. The EU is in total economic collapse. The war in Libya has failed, unrelated to rebels, there are dark secrets there. Gaddafi had suckered Tony Blair, with the help of Israel, into a position to be blackmailed, arms and oil contracts, huge political payoffs, not just to Britain but across Europe. Gaddafi had financed half of Europe’s elections and had bought the heart of Washington’s “neocons.” Gaddafi always knew where to put money, no reason to bribe honest people. Always bribe crooks. In Washington, this left everone available, Gaddafi could pick and choose and he did. Washington and London are terrified of what he knows.

Assassinating Gaddafi is their last hope.

Rupert Murdoch’s veneer of smut peddler is now shown to be what it has always been. David Cameron, Tony Blair, even Netanyahu have always worked for him, Murdoch the “not so secret” prime mover in western politics, denying his Jewish heritage and religion when courting the hate mongers of the right and playing “most powerful Jew in the world” behind closed doors when he has chosen to wield real power, not just his friends that control the world’s press, the Federal Reserve system in the US but more. Murdoch controls both political parties in Britain, controls the GOP in the US, a political group on a binge of total insanity for sure, even treason, but it goes further.

Murdoch’s creation in the US, that he calls “the Tea Party,” crashed the world’s currency markets and set the planet spiraling to economic ruin. Solutions that gut the consumer economies, stifle growth but have no revenue based “balance” are simply economic sabotage. Murdoch and the Tea Party just murdered the United States. The remnants of the real Republican Party found themselves alone and powerless with no ability to turn to Democratic leadership that had been, in itself, crippled, bought and bribed.

It is important to note that nothing Lestch alleged against Borzellieri’s political activities was new or even recent. Nor, even more to the point, were Frank Borzellieri’s views unknown to his superiors, who had twice confirmed that they did not conflict with Catholic doctrine. Indeed, Borzellieri was a colorful public figure in New York, where he was three times overwhelmingly elected to the school board until it was abolished as part of government schooling’s protracted death throes.

Obviously the Archdiocese of New York simply panicked when confronted with a left-wing flash mob.

I was appalled when Frank Borzellieri was fired as principal of Our Lady of Mount Carmel School over his ties to a “white supremacist” group. Not only did the newspaper account that led to his dismissal [White supremacist principal running Bronx school with majority black and Latino students, By Corinne Lestch, NY Daily News, July 31, 2011] wrongly call American Renaissance “white supremacist” but his firing violates a core principle of American law: “bad thoughts” are not yet a crime. No one even suggested that he had harmed the black and Hispanic students in his care.

The article concerned only Frank’s past writings, not his current behavior. Just being a white “racist”, which was never defined, was sufficient grounds for dismissal.

I do not exaggerate: to be accused of “white nationalism” or white “racism” is quickly becoming the equivalent of being charged with atheism in 16th century Europe or being a communist during the Cold War. It is the perfect candidate for demonization because “white nationalists” do not riot when persecuted, lack any powerful lobbying group that could get them included in the latest Hate Crime law, and never insist that school textbooks highlight their contributions to American history. Can you imagine a 9th grade US history textbook claiming that a “race realist” wrote the Declaration of Independence?

The push for a new “centrist” third party being orchestrated behind the scenes at the highest levels is quietly escalating as the 2012 election cycle gets under way.

As recently as July 25, Chris Cillizza, chief in-house political columnist for The Washington Post, hyped the theme that “advocates of a third party—or at the very least another viable option in the 2012 presidential race—seem to be sprouting up all over.”

To many free-thinking Americans, third parties sound like a grand idea (which they are), but the problem—as AFP has been alone in the independent media in pointing out—is that the third party concept being touted by Cillizza has its origins in the elite, high-finance connected circles that already dominate both the Republican and Democratic parties.

In other words, the “centrist” party being promoted is designed to undercut the viability of any serious populist challenge to the power elite who already dominate the political structure in America. In short, it is a “controlled opposition.”

Cillizza’s influential “must read” weekly “Monday Fix” column—prominently placed each week on page 2 of the Post—featured the headline “Anger at Washington Revives Third-Party Push” and proceeded to describe a number of ongoing activities designed to set a third party in place. Cillizza noted, “Those who closely monitor these third-party efforts say that not only is there an array of groups with similar goals, but there also is money flowing to them from wealthy individuals trying to change the two-party dynamic.”

The decision of more than 90 U.S. senators to press President Obama for Iraq-style sanctions on Iran flew in the face of what some observers warned could be the beginning of a stress test of the international support for pressuring Iran and another step closer to a potential war with the Islamic Republic.

But a Tuesday press release [PDF] from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) brings to mind eery parallels between the escalation of sanctions against Iran and the slow lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The press release read:

AIPAC applauds today’s bipartisan letter—signed by 92 U.S. Senators—to the administration urging it to sanction the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), or Bank Markazi. The letter, spearheaded by Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Mark Kirk (R-IL), notes that the CBI lies at the center of Iran’s strategy to circumvent international sanctions against its illicit nuclear program.

Sanctioning Bank Markazi might, as mentioned by the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon, be interpreted as an act of war. But that doesn’t seem to bother AIPAC. Indeed, they’ve been down this sanctions road once before before the invasion of Iraq.

Indeed, as shown in the AIPAC press release, Iran is now the target of similar sanctions and bellicose rhetoric similar to those that targeted Iraq in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sanctioning Iran’s central bank and imposing a de facto oil embargo on Iranian oil exports would appear to be pages torn from the playbook before the invasion of Iraq.

Those of you following the barbaric rioting in Britain will not have failed to notice that a sizable proportion of the thugs are white, something not often seen in this country.

Not only that, but in a triumph of feminism, a lot of them are girls. Even the "disabled" (according to the British benefits system) seem to have miraculously overcome their infirmities to dash out and steal a few TVs.

In fact, the military training inside U.S. cities and neighborhoods in anticipation for civil disturbances in America has become all too common.

On June 9th, 2010 USNORTHCOM openly admitted that they were preparing for military operations INSIDE the continental United States.

Considering the fact that these drills and plans formed during the Gulf Oil disaster and were not used during the crisis, they were most likely for something in the future such as the economic collapse that is upon us.

While we could continue to list the literally thousands of reports that indicate that military leaders are planning on unleashing troops on the American people, the evidence provided above is more than enough to paint a clear picture.

If what is happening in London happens in America or worse, if we experience a full scale economic collapse or terror attack on par or worse than 9/11, we know exactly what will happen.

The American people will be victim to sound cannons, gun confiscations, beatings, and detention camps.

You might think that 20 percent of the American Congress going on all-expenses-paid, weeklong junkets to a foreign country — paid for by a lobby for that country — would be newsworthy, especially when the top congressional leaders of both parties are leading the trips.

You would be wrong.

Eighty-one congressional representatives from all over the country, led by Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, are traveling to Israel this month. Most are freshmen congressmen, and the group includes half of all the freshmen Republicans voted into office in 2010.

The weeklong trips are being paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), which was created in 1990 as a supporting organization of AIPAC, America’s major pro-Israel lobbying organization, and they are located in the same building. AIEF, which is only one of numerous organizations pushing pro-Israel policies, has an annual budget of over $24 million, with an even larger endowment.

This is an extraordinary situation. No other lobby on behalf of a foreign country comes anywhere near controlling such wealth or taking so many of America’s elected representatives on a propaganda trip to its favorite country.

For the last five years, the Middle East-Central Asian region has been on an active war footing.

Syria has significant air defense capabilities as well as ground forces.

Syria has been building up its air defense system with the delivery of Russian Pantsir S1 air-defense missiles. In 2010, Russia delivered a Yakhont missile system to Syria. The Yakhont operating out of Russia's Tartus naval base "are designed for engagement of enemy's ships at the range up to 300 km". (Bastion missile systems to protect Russian naval base in Syria, Ria Novosti, September 21, 2010).

The structure of military alliances respectively on the US-NATO and Syria-Iran-SCO sides, not to mention the military involvement of Israel, the complex relationship between Syria and Lebanon, the pressures exerted by Turkey on Syria's northern border, point indelibly to a dangerous process of escalation.

Any form of US-NATO sponsored military intervention directed against Syria would destabilize the entire region, potentially leading to escalation over a vast geographical area, extending from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with Tajikistan and China.

In the short run, with the war in Libya, the US-NATO military alliance is overextended in terms of its capabilities. Whiel we do not forsee the implementation of a US-NATO military operation in the short-term, the process of political destabilization through the covert support of a rebel insurgency will in all likelihood continue.

In this video clip, a Mexican military helicopter can be seen flying over the Laredo International Bridge. A second helicopter can be seen flying over a neighborhood in Laredo, Texas. These maneuvers were allegedly part of a Mexican military operation known as ‘Lince Norte’ (Northern Lynx), in which the military killed over 30 members of Los Zetas, including the local leader and ‘accountant’ Jorge de la Peña, aka. ‘El Pompín.’ Last Saturday, one of these helicopters landed at the Laredo International Airport (on the Texas side of the border).

A large congressional delegation is heading for Israel. During three weeks of recess, 55 Republicans and 26 Democrats will enjoy “educational” trips funded by the American Israel Education Foundation, a tax-exempt nonprofit located in the same Washington, D.C., building as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Absent AIPAC’s influence on pro-Israel campaign contributors, members of Congress would probably skip international travel this year to meet the pressing needs of their districts or to venture to places of actual importance to the U.S., such as Europe, China, or Latin America. Instead, because AIPAC is always watching members of Congress, our representatives go to Israel. But this raises an important question: Who is really behind AIPAC?

AIPAC’s last IRS list of contributors claims the organization now has only two major donors [.pdf]. As a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organization (a category intended for civic leagues, social welfare organizations, and local associations of employees) AIPAC files an IRS Form 990. AIPAC has long structured its fiscal year end in such a way that it languidly files 2-year-old data while other nonprofits are rushing to report their previous year. Therefore, the AIPAC Form 990 listed as “year 2010″ at Guidestar.org, the officially designated website to consult such data, is actually year 2009 data [.pdf]. It also lacks the most important data in Form 990 — donor contributions.

Unlike the far more numerous nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations, which have to continually “means test” that they have a wide public funding base in order for contributor donations to be tax-deductible, contributions to 501(c)(4) organizations such as AIPAC (which actively lobbies Congress, the executive, and numerous government agencies) are not tax-deductible. There are no contribution limits to 501 (c)(4) nonprofit groups. Individuals, foreign nationals, partnerships, associations, and other organizations may contribute whatever amount they like to a 501(c)(4).

Given AIPAC’s oversize clout in U.S. Middle East policy, it’s always informative to see just how many people are giving — and how much. When AIPAC’s founder, Isaiah Kenen, was dispatched in the early 1950s from his job at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs with orders to lobby the U.S. Congress for guns and diplomatic support as an American (rather than the U.S. State Department as an Israeli foreign agent), it was supposed to be only a six-month gig. As that operation morphed into a semi-permanent Washington institution run outside the normal purview of the Foreign Agents Registration Act office, AIPAC was forced to tap a very small base of wealthy donors (some with criminal records) while simultaneously receiving covert support from the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency in Jerusalem.

It's no stretch to imagine that cyberspace will likely serve as another front in the wars of the future. But now, the Pentagon is reportedly kicking things into high gear with a new initiative which sets to track intel across social media. The program could cost up to $42 million and is currently soliciting research proposals.

The new Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program was submitted under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Department of Defense. The goal is to "develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base" to help the agency keep abreast with communication technologies, namely Twitter.

Now is the time for China to use its “financial weapon” to teach the United States a lesson if it moves forward with a plan to sale arms to Taiwan. In fact, China has never wanted to use its holdings of US debt as a weapon. It is the United States that is forcing it to do so.

The US House of Representatives just passed a debt ceiling bill on Aug. 1. On the next day, a total of 181 members of the House of Representatives signed a letter sent to US President Barack Obama stating that the federal government should approve the sale of F-16 C/D fighter jets to Taiwan as soon as possible to help ensure peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

The US Senate passed the debt ceiling bill on Aug. 2, and Obama signed it into law. Shortly thereafter, the US Treasury obtained the authorization to issue 400 billion US dollars in new debt. Will China become the largest buyer of US debt again?

Despite knowing that major creditor countries, especially China, would be the main buyers of its new debt, certain arrogant and disrespectful US Congress members have totally ignored China’s core interests by pressuring the president to sell advanced jets and even an arms upgrade package to Taiwan.